"Alex, You're Glowing!" Nickelodeon, Natalie Merchant, the Pink Opaque and Me

There are distinct memories we carry from our childhood years. Some are real but most are a knitted assortment of fractured recollection, sensory encounter, flattened context, life experience, and shifting perspective. What we are remembering is not what actually happened, it's how we remember it from the last time we thought about it.

And if you live long, you create a train of thought where jangled memory defines present reality.

All that to say, I have many distinct memories about driving home in the back of my mom's car after visiting my grandparents. The son is setting and I, for reasons that are unclear to me, am feeling maudlin.

My mom didn't get to experience much of her young adulthood before I was born, so unlike most of her contemporaries that favored Madonna, White Snake, and other 80s music, she would always have on alt stuff from the 90s, perhaps to try and enjoy the moment. And not Nirvana or Pearl Jam, but the kind of acceptable pop stardom for parents. Alanis Morisette, REM, Ace of Base.

And a lot of Natalie Merchant, solo artist and front voice of 10,000 Maniacs.

In the most tangible version of these memories, I'm in mom's Ford Tempo that would always make me sick (or maybe it was the tan Honda by that point?), when Natalie Merchant's Trouble Me comes on the air and mood matched moment.

The lyrics were strange to me because the song sounded mild but the words made me think of Fear Street books. Remember those? Damn, I was a 90s kid, for better and worse. Anyway, I would hear Natalie croon and it would call to mind the eponymous Fear family and their Kennedy-like tragedies that haunted the reader.

And haunted is how I felt too. That song haunted me. But in a way that I courted, desired. I couldn't understand why until much later.

In the trans allegorical film I Saw the TV Glow, two young people are actually tv characters trapped in a fictional reality by the series Bad Guy. In order to save the day for the season premiere, they have to break out of the "midnight realm" in which they are bound (a gothically depicted American suburb, of course) to reunite in the astral plane of The Pink Opaque (the tv show) and save the day.

Maddie, who channeled tv character Tara, was willing to do this, burying herself alive so that she may be reborn. She travels back to the midnight realm to try and convince Owen, who is Isabel on the show, to do the same. The symbolism is just that for trans people: our true selves are buried by society's Bad Guys and if we are able to break free from their cutches, we can live as who we are meant to be.

In one pivotal scene, Maddie, watching an episode with Owen, has a look of horror on her face as the tv glows with the show's action. If you've seen publicity stills of the movie, you are familiar with it. Jack Haven plays Maddy and does quite a good job. Haven's performance is my favorite of the movie.

I never had a pure tv glow moment, although more on the impact of The Secret World of Alex Mack later. But when I heard Natalie Merchant sing Trouble Me in that context of driving home at sunset, there was something coming through the radio.

A voice? Not exactly.

A personality? Eh.

A person? Yes.

In the 90s, trans kids were not given the language to explore their gender. I don't even know if I was aware of gender affirmation or that it was possible. Which is why so many of us connect to tv shows, movies, songs, etc. that, while not explicitly trans, say something to us about who we really are.

What I got from Natalie Merchant in that song is that a female was speaking to me. Not Merchant. Not my mother. Not God. But someone.

It was the girl I had imagined time and time again. The girl who became my coping mechanism, that I buried every feminine instinct within me into. An inactive invisible best friend who could take on what men and boys told me I should not be.

I imagined for a long time (because becoming a girl was not a real thing to me) that this fictional female would be my ideal girlfriend. My ideal wife. That she would mimic the gestures, the loves, the radio glows in my life. I imagined this because I wanted to be understood. Because I did not have the language to be understood. Because you could explore what sports you liked and what shows you watched and what you wanted to be when you grew up. But you couldn't explore gender.

And so now my soul was troubled, to paraphrase Jesus. And what shall I say? This person, whoever she/they was within me, was saying in an accessibly mournful way to put the burden on her. Bother her with my problems. Asking me why I'm holding back when she is here?

Let me know where the hurt is and how to heal.

There was a hurt. A deep hurt. I knew a female presence could heal me. I trusted my mother, my grandmother, my female teachers. But they were not the ones called to this battle. Who was? It was this person within me. She said it was ok. That I could be what I felt like being: having a stuffed bear in bed, imagining myself acting with the softness of the girls in my class, feeling like a person I recognized versus the person others wanted me to be.

But how do you articulate any of this in a time when trans people existed on the periphery of society, were killed with even greater impunity than they are now, and where girls were seen as a subspecies of human? That's a girl's song. You hit like a girl. That's stuff for girls. Don't act like a girl.

So she went back into the recesses of my mind. I named her Allison, the one person who understood me. I thought about her less through the next stage of adolescence. We set aside childish things.

It was around this time I started watching The Secret World of Alex Mack.

___

Like a lot of kids in the 90s, I was obsessed with Nickelodeon shows. Keenan and Kel was my favorite but I really loved them all: Rugrats, Doug, All That (the millennial kid's SNL), Hey Dude, Hey Arnold, Are You Afraid of the Dark? I'm sure I'm missing many others.

And then there was The Secret World of Alex Mack.

Jason Concepcion, one of my favorite culture critics, pushed back against the lack of magic on the tv version of Game of Thrones once, writing: A crippled boy becomes a powerful sorcerer. A bastard becomes a king. Broken things heal with newfound strength in ways we never expect. We all inhabit these interior worlds of unspoken dreams and fears. A great fantasy story lets us share those worlds in a way that feels thrilling, but safe. Sad, but also hopeful. In real life, words fail us, all the time. Every day. There’s things you want to say to people that you just never say. For your whole life. In fantasy, life-long bonds are forged wordlessly with dragons and owls and wolves. And these tales are a way to meet profound grief wrapped in the armor of imagination.

The Secret World of Alex Mack was not fantasy in the way we think of fantasy. It was probably science fiction, or more accurately a contemporary comic book superhero tale. But it gave us the escape to meet grief with armor. A girl walking home from school gets sprayed by a mysterious toxic chemical. All of a sudden, she has a telekinetic ability to move objects, a la The Force. She can also melt into a puddle to be invisible to those in a room and listen in on what was happening. These are her "powers" as they are constantly referred to. The downside is: her face glows when she is embarrassed, and also, her father works for the company with the chemical, and is the moral balance to the company's more nefarious ends. Thus the added need for secrecy from her parents.

Shows like Alex Mack have a common subtext: your kid years suck. And there's not much you can do about it. Here's an experience where you can pretend you are free or that there is something unique about you. The show was not profound the way Jason Concepcion described some art as profound but it could speak to me and thousands of bored millennial kids like me who yearned for a different station in life.

I saw almost the entire run of Alex Mack, although I retain few details about specific episodes. It was Alex herself that has stuck with me more than anything, as the trans metaphor I did not know I needed.

My greatest dysphoria has always been around my face and hair. I have always loved the beauty of a feminine face. Angular or not, it doesn't matter. Obviously, I don't go around staring into women's faces but I have to make a concerted effort. I never aspired to be a great beauty but I would feel somewhat whole with a cute, female face. If I ever have any gender affirming surgery, it would probably be FFS.

But as far as clothes, I have always been too intimidated to go high femme. I'm not comfortable in pink. I'm not jazzed about wearing a dress. I would love to rock some feminine clothes in the way of solid tops, slacks, shorts, leggings and capris for sure. But nothing too femme. I'm aware that this is probably internalized transmisogyny but for the first time ever, I'm dealing with my feelings about myself so I'm trying to stick with what feels safe.

Larisa Oleynik had that kind of face and hair but Alex Mack was low femme. Often in a ball cap and wearing flannel or other solids, she made femininity accessible to me as a kid. I didn't understand that at the time but I do now, especially as my concept of womanhood has expanded.

Being a girl, having a secret, dressing casually...that is how I wanted to live.

But again, there is no way to express that at 13.

I have no desire to revisit The Secret World of Alex Mack. The purpose of those shows was to explore pre-teen and teen angst and I'm well past that era. Even nowadays, I don't do a lot of YA or bildungsromans or watch 90s stuff out of a sense of nostalgia. I'm in a different place in life and no longer look to the past, especially as I try to write a new present for myself.

One of the more effective scenes in I Saw the TV Glow — indeed the scene I think of when I think of the movie — is when Owen tries to watch The Pink Opaque years later only to find it corny and uninspired. It makes sense. Director Jane Schoenbrun has said they weren't aiming to create a 90s tv show but the feeling of watching a 90s tv show and to that end, they did an excellent job. It wasn't until my second viewing of the movie that I considered how memories of the things of my youth pointed their way to Allison.

___

I've been in a place of immense privilege for most of my life, including the language I speak. When I'm in the States, I don't worry about vocally communicating. It's only in the last decade that Spanish has gained a modicum of linguistic visibility but not to the point where not knowing it is a social deficit for me. Rarely do I have to worry about being heard, in both language and expression. Masculinity might have been a burden for me to carry but I can't deny I benefitted from it.

Communicating feelings is another story. We're not taught to do it as humans in a way that can be universally considered safe. Cultural conditioning buries our true sentiments under layers of social dirt. Some languages are better than others at expressing thought and feeling, same with some cultures. English is not that language. WASP United States American is not that culture.

So when you're navigating your gender in a way beyond assigned-at-birth binaries, you look for the language to describe your feelings. If it's tough to talk about feeling sorrow or depression, imagine how much harder it is to talk about why you think you might be a girl.

But sometimes, if you're lucky, the language finds you. And it leads you to understand things in ways you could never imagine. Sometimes the tv glows, sometimes the radio hums.

It's taken me far too long to realize who was making those sounds. When I started this journey, I would have said "her." I would have continued to differentiate myself with Allison the way I did as a kid.

But now I know it was me. It was always within me. I just couldn't understand me. I'm sad and angry that it took this long to listen to myself. I'm also happy that I did find myself.

And when Trouble Me comes through my AirPods, I give myself a hug, knowing at last she is free.