there is a sliver of myself who wishes i could go back to my 22yo self and tell her, "go to berkeley, don't go to western NYS, and get into something tech-oriented. stay out of marketing comms."

that way, while it's true i may have fallen into the trope of a prescriptive vocation permitted & expected of trans women, i also wouldn't be broken & poor today, and i probably wouldn't have made any civil justice history whatsoever, and i'd probably not be named patience and on and on and on

(i can say all of this with a sense of relative confidence, given end-stage capitalism's obsession with tech money and employment)