Why I Wear Rose-Colored Glasses

On Gender, (Dis)Honesty and (Mis)Fortune

Peaceful and rosy-lensed in the backyard in 2022

Growing up, I didn’t know it, reader: the fact that I was an object of envy. As I got As and scholastic awards and other creative and academic opportunities, I didn’t know that others in the world watched me with a blend of annoyance and bitterness that frequently sharpened to a point of righteous indignation. The classmates who rolled their eyes when I raised my hand, the teachers who sighed heavily when I took my seat, the fair-weather friends who seemed luridly interested in the various dramas of my teenage life but could be no more bothered to intervene on my behalf than a soap opera fan could be to step into the TV and help out her favorite show’s characters. And later on, the classmates became workshop-mates and romantic partners, the teachers became colleagues and bosses. I sold books, got good reviews, got awards, gained access to social and creative spaces that allowed me yet more opportunities. The fair-weather friends remained fair-weather, though the stakes merely heightened: it was not some dinner table family drama I was panicking about, but dramas concerning my reputation, my health, my finances. For every pissed-off classmate, teacher, colleague and ex, there were two or three who loved me dearly, who tried to warn and inform me, but I had no idea the cloud of others’ resentment I was living in, the ever-sharpening sword of Damocles dangling just above my head. The words were spiky: Things come so easily to Rafael. A charmed life. Unearned prosperity. For many, I epitomized not just identitarian privilege (white, upper middle class, degree-ed to the hilt) but the unfair possession of creative ability, which came with the massive added benefit of a sense of purpose.

“You don’t know how good you have it,” one of my best friends told me in our mid-twenties – another kind, oblique warning. “You keep telling me you hate yourself, and yet there seriously are people who’d want to be you.”

Rest assured, reader: this essay is no longform subtweet. I was not standing piously by, shaking my head in bewilderment as the callous slings and arrows of the world rent me through, wondering why I, virtuous little Raf, should be so afflicted by the ill wishes of a malicious band of others. No, I was having a hard time seeing the reality my loving friends were trying to help me see because I was myself bound up in such knots of envy and self-loathing that I could not see the forest of my own life for its trees.

You see, reader, the old adage is true: there will always be someone better than you. Even as I was making great grades and winning awards, there were teacher’s pets more stalwart and nimble than me, with GPAs and standardized test scores higher than mine, not just smart but well-liked and athletic and inevitably Ivy-bound. You can publish a book – even a book with a surprisingly good advance – but rest assured, someone has gotten a bigger advance than you, and their book sells far more copies and even wins some awards. It’s not even difficult to find these loathed high-achievers, these jerks for whom everything just seems to have been dished out on a silver platter. Imagine that, even as I had been beset by my own frothy coterie of angry ill-wishers, I was looking beyond them, to the many frothy coteries of which I was a part.

“Are you kidding?” I responded to that friend, who had long grown exasperated with me. “Look at X, or at Y. Look at how good they’re doing. If someone wants to be me, their life must truly be falling apart.”

And how easy it was, at the slightest change of fortune, to justify my position. Ha! See? My book’s gone out of print and X’s is a bestseller! See how I suffer? I began to take a twisted kind of delight in what appeared to be the mounting confirmations of my grass-is-always-greener mentality. The patience of the loving well-wishers – and there were many, for my ability to make friends has always been another one of my most celebrated and resentment-inducing traits – wore increasingly thin.

And of course throughout all of this, there was the fact about me so shameful and compromising that it was both my kryptonite and Achilles heel at once: my body. Specifically, the many failures of my body, and how they were bound up with my sexuality. Reader, I strove to be thin and toned and taut and feminine with the kind of existential desperation that I’ve observed my male friends strive to become sizable-income property-owners. My fuckability – a fact about which I personally did not care aside from someday becoming the adoring butch to a singular, beloved femme – seemed to be the long and short of me, not just the guarantor of my safety and upward mobility but my entire reason for being. That I succeed at the career stuff, the prose stylist stuff, felt so key simply because – all feminist advancements and Love Is Love and #MeToo-ing aside – we still live in a society where women are their bodies and men are their capital. And, despite being an A student accustomed to exerting my very best efforts all my life, I just couldn’t get my body to work.

By this I mean, dear reader, that I could not stay thin. Or rather, thin enough, with perfect breasts and butt to match. I could not maintain a thinness that signaled discipline, which would in turn signal class success and desirability in the manner of a man’s Rolex or Maserati. Nor could I maintain heterosexuality and a Feminine Heterosexual Aesthetic: I was a boat against the current of my desires, borne back ceaselessly into gender-nonconforming lesbianism. These developments were not fun or cute when it came to being-in-the-world, especially not among men, and especially not among those men who held any degree of power over me. An unruly female body coupled with a set of desires that precludes the male body? Well then, the patriarchal ill-wishers seemed to delight in saying, fuck you, too. These immutable aspects of my personhood were somehow taken as personal affronts.

I would be lying if I said that, when I decided to begin HRT and get a double mastectomy in 2021, some part of me wasn’t thinking that the career stuff had at least come easier for me than the embodiment-and-desire stuff. Even if there were still so many people “making it” in ways I wasn’t, I’d at least been able to make some headway in the artistic realm, whereas fighting against my genes and desires seemed to be a losing battle. And of course there was the brain-melting misogyny that definitely didn’t go away with any amount of career success: the gropings and attempted assaults¹, the humiliations private and public, the cheerfully condescending mansplanations, the diagnoses and attendant hospitalizations (voluntary and not) that all seemed to add up to twenty-first century “feminine hysteria.” I was tired of it, and I liked women like a man and had been doing my best and most ardent impression of a boy genius for years, was capable of the confidence and the witty rejoinders and the sentence-level maximalism so unseemly on a woman’s page but so welcome on a man’s. Would it not be easier to just seal the deal, to lose the boobs and grow a beard and escape the impossibility of womanhood altogether?

So I did.

From left to right: finding my book in an airport bookstore (2023), immediately post-double mastectomy (2021), on the beach in Brazil (2015), third-grade school picture (1998 or thereabouts)

*       *

Reader, I’m sure you’re wondering when I’m going to address the title of this essay. The halfway point seems as good as any.

In 2021, the year I began my transition, I met a wonderful woman who loves to crochet and cook and write poetry, who has beautiful hand tattoos and incredible aesthetic sense, who is a thinker and a reader and above all a cottage mystic, the kind of person who sincerely wants the best for everyone, who cannot help but change the lives of those she meets.

She certainly changed mine, reader, when she asked me why I was so envy-ridden and self-loathing and given to complaining about all the ways the world had dealt me an unfair hand. Instead of doing what my well-intended well-wishers had in the past and telling me to take stock of all my impressive CV lines, or take comfort in the fact that I was someone else’s envy-object, she posed a simple question to me: What if you have everything you need to be happy for the rest of your life right now? I cocked an eyebrow and shook my head, began enumerating the raises I’d need to get and the books I’d need to sell and the prizes I’d need to win just to start.

She interrupted me gently: “What if you didn’t even have anything you have right now, and you were still happy?”

It sounded like gibberish to me, but it became clearer as she and I fell deeper in love. My life began to change, both through loving her and considering her question. I reformulated it thusly: What if this sense of scarcity, which seems so easy to find regardless of what I do have, actually isn’t real?

And that, reader, is when I began to stop contorting myself into knots of envy, comparison and longing. It became easier and easier to celebrate others’ successes until it actually felt euphoric – more, even, than celebrating my own. Material generosity of a kind I’d never known before became second-nature, too. And my vice grip on my body loosened as well: I gained weight and I dressed flamboyantly and I felt happy. And the happier and more at peace with myself I felt, the more things seemed to work out for me: I sold a book, and then another. My love and I got engaged. I got tenure.

One afternoon, I chanced to find a pair of rose-colored glasses in a Goodwill and tried them on. The store’s fluorescence was subdued. The walls and ceiling seemed to glow softly, and so did the sky when I stepped outside. I breathed easier. The world felt right. I told my love about it and she explained that colored lenses could be therapeutic on their own, whether or not I needed a prescription.  

I became a yet more jovial person. My students noticed. You’re so happy, Professor Frumkin! During a meeting about a novel-in-progress and applying to MFA programs, a young GNC kid who could have been me ten years ago observed wryly: This kind of joy you’ve got, it’s rare, especially in academia. I want to know your secret.

And what did I tell them, reader? That I’d merely needed the love of a good woman? That I had finally understood the complex mental calculus required to attract material success and then actually take joy in it? That I had at last figured out how to ride high without the substances I’d relied upon throughout my twenties?

“This is going to sound annoying, like something I’d say in class.” I tapped my frames. “But these are the literalization of a metaphor.”

The student laughed, pretended to roll their eyes, but was obviously intrigued.

“I’ve always been the kind of person who wanted to see the world through rose-colored glasses. I know because these felt great from the moment I tried them on, and I haven’t taken them off since. I like to see the world as good, my situation as bountiful. I’ve just been suppressing that tendency for years.”

“Why?” They seemed genuinely perplexed.

“Why do we suppress anything? It feels easier to go with the flow, to pretend you’re straight or your life is irredeemably shitty or the apocalypse is upon us because that’s what we’re all expected to do and say, and the evidence can feel overwhelming.” I grinned. “But it’s not conclusive. So I’m coming out to you right now as an optimist.”

The life of the uncloseted optimist – the out and proud optimist, let’s say – does not feel challenging. Quite the opposite: it feels as if the heat has been turned up and the spikes of ice you’ve been walking on are melting, so that eventually you’re just walking on soft earth. Where there was pain and fear and resistance there is now acceptance, and not the acceptance of defeat, but of the unending possibility of joy, of plenitude. Things were no longer just-around-the-corner for me: wherever I was, I’d arrived.

Goofy times with a loving friend and colleague (who happens to edit a badass 18th century journal!)

*   *        

What they don’t tell you in AA (or in grad school, or in a faculty meeting), is that you can have too much of a good thing. More precisely: it was great that I’d roused myself from the prison of I-need-more/I-deserve-more, but I’d done so without bumpers. I could only expect to bowl so many strikes before my ball landed in the gutter.

Which it did when I met a fellow trans man who’d just moved to Carbondale with his nonbinary partner. They were Southerners, anti-trans bill refugees, and had moved up north to be close to the trans man’s best friend (also a trans man, also living in Carbondale). They were all my and my partner’s age, and we all seemed to get along well. Especially me and the trans man.

There’s much to be written about this trans man, whom we’ll call John Wayne. For now, I don’t care to share too much about Mr. Wayne and his sinister local affiliations, nor about the dynamics of our “friendship” nor my ensuing “friendships” with his partner and best friend. The only thing you need to know about John Wayne, dear reader, is that he is a talented mimic and student of human psychology – one must be in his line of work – and he knew exactly how to “work” an uncloseted optimist such as myself.

Because though I’d developed a new, more generous way of being and seeing, had the capacity to love both myself and others in ways I hadn’t before, I still felt guilty. So incredibly guilty for all those years I’d spent overlooking all the amazing things I had just to writhe in envy of others’ more or slightly more. All that time wasted, and those loving friends alienated! And of course there was the ugly matter of my privilege: the bedrock of money and race that had given me a huge leg up in getting where I was. Not only had I been born into ease, but I had just added to it by injecting myself with testosterone and transforming into some approximation of a white man. John Wayne knew all of this because he studiously read my books and personal essays, though he didn’t need to because I also told it all to him, in big heaping embarrassed confessionals. Soon enough, he had all the material he needed to torture me.

And torture me he did, through a highly potent form of psychological coercion I didn’t think to guard myself against because I never saw it coming. He nearly broke up my engagement, cost me my job, and cost me my life. The fact that all he ultimately managed to get away with was doubling my debt, wiping out my savings, and leaving me with a debilitating case of PTSD and a suite of attendant psychological issues is perhaps the best outcome for the situation. He and his associates turned out to be professional con artists whose employers, though local, have connections spanning the globe. I can’t imagine their previous victims fared as well as I have.

It's okay to love the world, to have faith in humanity. It’s good, even – not just for your health, but for the health of the human collective. It feels good to be thought well of, and to think well of others. It’s not that this goodwill must be checked with harsh doses of reality, that I should have sprinkled my Pollyanna-ish naivete with a good old-fashioned dash of Hobbesian cynicism. What I needed most was not yet more cynicism and resentment – I’d had a lifetime of that – but guardrails, both to protect me from professional extortionists like John Wayne and from my own self-loathing. Because it was not my newfound love of the world and myself that he used against me, but the vestiges of my self-hatred. My guilt over the past, my issues of embodiment and desire I was fleeing from, even my history of substance abuse: he identified me as an ideal mark and he used it all to his and his employers’ advantage.

So now my task is to heal. And of course, to see my optimism through this undeniable stress test: a period of financial insolvency unlike any I’ve experienced before in my life, urgent medical needs related to my shattered psyche and upended gender, and ongoing difficulties related to being pegged as an easy mark in a place that, like most places in America, is far more glass-half-empty than it is glass-half-full. But I still have my love, and we have most of our beloved animals, and there are so many beautiful things to look forward to. The kinds of things that are most visible through rose-colored glasses.

Bubba sees the world through cat-eye glasses

* *

Thank you to all the wonderful friends and well-wishers who’ve offered your love and support! Some of you have asked me how you might go about filling my and Fig’s cup during this turbulent time. Here some small ways:

1. If this essay gave you even the littlest bit of energy and hope and goodwill, you could leave me a tip via Venmo! Could be the price of a coffee, could be whatever feels good as a token of your appreciation!

2. If you’ve got an unpaid subscription to the Cosmic Cheeto, consider upgrading to paid! Or, if you’d rather not upgrade to paid: share this Substack with others whom you think might enjoy it!

3. If you haven’t already, consider buying a book of mine, either for yourself or a friend! Or if you’ve already read a book of mine, consider giving it a review on Amazon or Goodreads!

   Thank you, and love to you all! <3

1. I am in the minority among my fellow woman/female-bodied/trans man friends as someone who has miraculously *not* experienced full-on sexual assault.