Freya-Onions-report

I went back to visit my family for a few days towards the end of May. I hadn’t been back to my home town for a while, not since Christmas, so I thought it best to spend the May half term holiday there, working from home in the daytime, and spending the evenings with my family. 

It was nice to go back for just a few days. I think it allowed me to dodge the almost inevitable slide back into a teenage identity that happens when you return to the place and people you lived through that very hormonal and tormented period with. 

Usually, when I go back to the Midlands for a week or so, there’s a kind of buffer at either end, a layer of sanity and stability I want to call the ‘London buffer’. When I arrive home to my family, and walk back to the train station, the fact that I have just left from my usual life in London means I feel a distance between me and the town I am now walking through. I feel like the cosmopolitan visitor, wholly mentally detached from this small and parochial town on the edge of the Black Country. This distance is good; it’s much of what I had wanted growing up. 

Carrying this veil of metropolitan aloofness, the first day or so is usually very good and very fun. I go to the pub, catch up with family, tell them stories from my life. I feel like a tourist, and love the remoteness that comes with it. And the beer is better than much of what you can get in London.

So far so good, but then, a day or two down the line, the memory of London has begun to fade, and the barrier has closed. That detachment that makes the place fun in the first place, has dissolved, and you’re left just-a-bit-too-close to the reality of my childhood and teenage years. I feel myself getting caught up in little arguments, ones which the day prior I would haven’t cared to even involve myself in. The weight of the walls in my teenage bedroom weigh heavier. The hours feel longer. And boy did time feel like it moved slowly sometimes back then. Waiting. Etc.

The next few days, I’m usually looking forward to going home a great deal. When that day comes, the morning is great. The veil is back. I say goodbye to everyone.

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While I was back in the Midlands, I came across a trans music artist on TikTok, and she’s so brilliant that I want to discuss her on here. It was probably around 2 days into my visit, scrolling TikTok, and I came across this video. 

There was something being at home, sat in my childhood bedroom, and seeing her sing that song that made it seem so big and so profound. Her makeup, the drawn on eyebrows, the pain in her voice: she was everything I worshiped in my late teenage years. I sat there watching the video again and again, trying other videos too. 

I’m grateful that teenagers nowadays have access to so much more than we did even only ten years ago. 

I searched her up on Spotify, eager for an album to sink my teeth into during my exile. Her name is Iris Adam, ( I think she is in the process of changing it from her name on Spotify- I will update this post when I find out). I downloaded Healing Town, her 2023 album released when she was around 20 years old- she’s around 3 years younger than me I think.

A mix of Car Seat Headrest, Hole, Neutral Milk Hotel, she blends indie rock and folk influences to a very brilliant effect. Her lyrics tell stories of her life in Pittsburgh, VA. 

Very quickly, I was transfixed by her musical style, especially her lyrics, which seem to capture the pain of time slightly prior to and during early transition, better than I think anything else does. 

The instrumental of the opening track, ‘Fallen Town’, reminds me a lot of things like ‘In the Aeroplane Over the Sea’- the kind of desperate, failing and haunting sound that album seems to have. 

Then her voice comes in, and, as in her TikTok videos, it’s not what you’d expect to hear from looking at her- and, I think, creates a tension across her music that is central to its overall effect. 

Her low, rich and pained voice sounds a lot more like what you’d expect from her cis male counterparts, I’m thinking, for example, Jeff Mangum, or, Will Toledo, or Black Francis of Pixies. But, of course, she’s a trans woman, and her lyrics are absolutely reflective of that fact. Filled with the challenges, brutalities, but also the fragile joys of trans experience, her songs tell a story of early transition that is utterly compelling and intoxicating. 

Up against the brash, strained sound of her voice, the lyrics grind in tension with the delivery: where for her cis male counterparts, their voices speak of a kind of privileged if not compelling male angst, an alienation reflected inwards, Iris’s voice carries a beautiful strain of defiance and passion in the face of real discrimination and adversity. 

Nowhere is this tension more apparent than in ‘Healing Town’, the title track on the album, which tells the story of her early coming out, and getting kicked out of her family home. Where for the above mentioned artists, their vocal delivery and sonic style is in part product of their alienated and fractured masculinity, for Iris their influence is repurposed to express the unique challenges she faces as a trans woman. 

And then they kicked me out
Before I could tell them
Not that I would have
My dad would get scary

In a particularly brilliant section, Iris screams:

I’m not a man
I’m not a man
I am not a man
I’m not a man

And excellent encapsulation of the tension at the heart of her music: her repurposing of a style of singing and instrumentation that has so often been used to manufacture the concept of manhood. Doing so, in my opinion, she creates some of the best and most interesting music I’ve heard in the last few years. 

But Iris isn’t limited to brash, punkish declarations of injustice. In ‘Fallen Town’ for example, she sweeps from the haunting intro into this sensitive and gorgeous scene:

Wearing the nice sweatshirt
That you had knit for me
I wake before you and
You wake so grumpily
But I love the morning now
It’s when you let me see your facе
And you are so beautiful
You hold the sеcret
I will love you ’til my blood evaporates

Sitting in my teenage bedroom, I got goosebumps hearing these final lines. The echos of Lou Reed’s ‘Make Up’ (‘Your face when sleeping is sublime/ And then you open up your eyes’), the sense of the brief but hopeful moment that so often can be the only thing keeping you going during early transition and living in the closet. But it was those two lines: 

And you are so beautiful
You hold the sеcret

That for me captured a feeling that motivated so much of my teenage years and beyond. The kind of unknowing awe that I think many trans women feel towards other women before they come out. The way that secret always feels like it is on the threshold of revolution, slightly out of reach.

Anyway, she is my favourite trans music artist, which is saying a lot, it’s not like there’s a lack to choose from. 

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One thing that has really gotten me hyped over the last few weeks is the prospect of my upcoming holiday to Crete with Molly during the summer holidays. We’d booked the trip way back in February, but with so many months to go before we jetted off, hadn’t mentioned it much since until a video call with her the other week. 

During the call, we started to discuss travel arrangements, booking baggage etc, before looking through some photos of the admittedly very luxurious hotel we had booked. Since, we’ve both been pretty electrified with excitement.

It’s our first proper holiday together, which is especially exciting. We’ve generally always visited cities and towns, and done sightseeing and cultural things. This time, we both wanted a proper ‘drop and flop’ holiday- days laid dripping by the pool, skin faintly salted by the sea, cool evenings wearing sandals in restaurants. More than anything, I think this desire is a product of us both entering the working world. We want a time to do nothing. 

We’ve been buying things we need for the holiday. I’ve gotten a few new summer dresses from Next, one of  which I’m really hyped about, as a well as a black swimsuit that was advertised to me on TikTok. It was literally £68 or something, but I’ve gone down their marketing funnel hard, and it’s very flattering on me compared to a lot of the other cheaper ones I’ve tried. 

I’m just so excited to be able to spend some very lazy and idyllic days with Molly by the pool, reading my book, swimming around, drying off, and repeating. And then the evenings clip clopping down to the sea front for olives, taramasalata, and some glasses of Greek wine with dinner. Then some cheap Raki or Ouzo to close off the night. 

As a young child, these kinds of Mediterranean experiences were literally the light of my life, though probably lighter on the wine and olives and bigger on the chicken nuggets and chips. 

Writing this, I keep thinking of the long poem ‘Swimming Pool’ that I did when I was 20, and was my most sustained attempt to engage with my childhood and teenage obsession with Mediterranean holidays. I might upload it here. 

I’m so excited to be able to spend that time with Molly; weirdly, even though we see each other all the time it’s not actually that often that we get to spend an evening together just drinking and chatting, with no big event to go to. My TikTok algorithm is full of very blue seas, cool glasses of wine and whitewashed walls. 

Despite my insistence that I am no longer a summer person, that I love the Autumn and Winter, the darkness and the coolness, I could not be more hyped. I still need to buy the books I’m going to bring…

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One last thing before I go: my ballet obsession has continued, and I’ve seen two especially beautiful ballets recently: Onegin, which I saw live at the Royal Opera House, and Marguerite and Armand

I went to see Onegin alone one Tuesday evening, and it was absolutely stunning. I loved the interiority of Tatiana’s character, her obsession with the dark and distant Onegin, and the ecstasy of the mirror pas de deux in her bedroom. It really captured something of that totalising, liberating feeling you can get with a teenage crush, and the desperation that goes along with it. 

The following Tuesday, I watched Marguerite and Armand on the RBO streaming service. I hadn’t thought much of it going in: I knew little more than that it was choreographed by Frederick Ashton, who I generally like a great deal, and that it was only 33 minutes long or so. 

I watched it the first time without moving a muscle, bar my jaw dropping for the last ten minutes or so. After it finished, I couldn’t think of anything in the world to do other than watch it again immediately. The second viewing was when it really hit, and was honestly one of the most intense experiences I’ve ever had with art in my life. 

I sat there, my brain absolutely flooded with serotonin, or whatever the good chemical is. I could literally feel my whole brain and body just soaked with pleasure and appreciation. I couldn’t believe it, the ecstasy, the perfection of their every movement- the precision at the heart of their tragedy. 

Afterwards, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was dancing around my flat, laughing occasionally. I watched for the third time that evening, with Molly.

The ballet tells the story of Marguerite, a courtesan in nineteenth century Paris, who, dying from tuberculosis, remembers her tragic love affair with Armand – cut short by his father. Set to an orchestral arrangement of Liszt’s B minor piano sonata, the ballet quickly takes on an almost celestial significance. Ultimately, her marginalised, marked status as a sex worker, and her imprisonment in the claustrophobic world of upper class Paris is her downfall: Armand’s father tells her to cut off the relationship, not allowing her to tell him the reason why. 

Armand only finds out the truth behind her calling the love affair off when he visits her on her death bed. They have one final, heartbreaking dance as she loses her self to the illness. Wearing a pale blue satiny dress, he dances around the room one last time with her as she grows weaker and more limp. She reaches for the sky, the stars, as he lifts her up, experiences flying in his arms for one last time. He lays her down, closes her eyes, and lets out a single audible sob as the curtains close. Utterly incredible. Indescribably beautiful. A better story than Romeo and Juliet, straight up. Fight me. 

I haven’t even mentioned the costumes, especially the gorgeous red dress she wears in the scene where she first meets Armand, or the white dress with silk tassels in the second act.

I think part of why I resonate so much with her character is that Marguerite could so easily be trans: that her status as a courtesan is, more than anything, just a symbol of her marginalisation within the category of womanhood. We need a trans Marguerite! And more LGBT ballets more generally: I want a lesbian ballet, a gay ballet. They would be so brilliant so easily. 

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Anyway, it’s been another great few months. I’ve been feeling very good and enjoying myself a lot- and have lots to look forward to! I really enjoyed seeing SPELLLING in Shoreditch with Carrie this week, as well as going clubbing in Dalston with some friends. 

It’s been so hot the last few days. 28 degrees in London yesterday, and similar today. My room was lighting up with thunder and lightning last night, and my bed looked like one of those AI generated ‘which bed you sleeping in the hardest?’ posts. Rain coming down the windows. And lightning on the walls.

14/6/25