Notes on Glow
(It is recommended you read Glow here before or after reading this.)
I wrote Glow in April 2022.
My memories of writing it are fuzzy, though I have precise information about when I did. I was just out of a weekend where I had had the occasion to see a great amount of friends and acquaintances, and I had been filled with such happiness from so many things at the same time - being out and proud among people, finally cutting ties with my family, a gleefully budding queerplatonic relationship, a moment of fulfillment in my relationships overall, and accomodating several close ones for the occasion. I remember people telling me I was radiating something. I remember the joyous exhaustion that had followed that weekend, and eating breakfast with loved ones, and wanting to capture this absurd feeling that this was right. We were in Spring, I was slowly getting out of a long depression and healing from trauma, and it finally felt like in spite of everything that had happened, everything I had gone through, this had been worth it.
And so I opened my phone's note app, and I started to write.
And this text just... burst out of me.
I remember rereading it afterwards, after an hour or two of writing frantically, in a trance. It felt like I had managed to do something special, and precious. Like I had caught that moment, that feeling radiating within me into words, and these words were right.
Glow was also fueled by other things that deserve mention here (and which may also contribute to why I instinctively wrote this text in English and not in French). As I think back on it, I realize how deeply infused it is with queer and trans fictions and essays. It is a bundle of and a tribute to these things that changed me.
The first of the main two I recall is We Know the Devil, a visual novel by Worst Girls Games I played back in 2020 and that never left my head (and contributed to definitely cracking my egg). There is a particular poetry of the queer and beautifully monstrous in it, and it has had a deep impact on my writings, and it is the clear source of some of recurring metaphors I now find in what I write - notably about light, and wings, and words like "bloom", and the color yellow. All these images probably appeared in at least one or two smaller texts I wrote before Glow. They will surely keep slipping into things I write in the future.
I should also credit WKtD's sister game too, Heaven Will Be Mine, and notably one of its endings, for more of the same feeling of functioning in a community so alien to most people - and the beauty of it. And this song from its OST, among others.
The second thing that contributed the most to this text is a blog from the late 2000s called taking steps, by which I mean the prose of its writer, little light.
Not that surprisingly, I found it by chance in early 2022 when reading reviews of We Know the Devil (a moment when I was back to obsessively reading meta-content about it). One of the blog's articles was among the hyperlinks of some wonderful (spoiler) review of the game; it was a piece of writing called the seam of skin and scales.
Reading it for the first time filled me with something fierce; I have been carrying it with me ever since. A few other ones contributed too: the sky is falling in particular; but I also want to mention the extremely raw fair, over the rainbow, and still walking and talking. Some of these are more than 17 years old and I cannot begin to explain what they do to me.
I hope they can find you too.
As a slightly less intense extra, I am pretty sure I used the phrasing "secret little haven" as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Secret Little Haven by Victoria Dominowski, a fascinating small game about hanging out on chats and forums on a computer in 1999 with a good amount of gender feels, that I played in 2020 too.
Well, now I want to replay and reread all that.
What else is there to say?
Oh. Yes.
The impossible feeling I felt when I wrote Glow didn't last. It imploded, notably with some personal difficulties and another depression rearing its head a few months after that. I try, now, not to see that month of April 2022 as a moment that epitomized me. (I wrote other texts on that sensation. They are not happy writings.)
I have grown a lot since then, of course. I have gone through new feelings so absurdly bright in and of themselves. But it's hard, sometimes, paradoxically, to have caught something so enormous into words, and to look back, and to feel like things have changed.
Still. Sometimes I feel something similar again. Different, but similar.
And now, when I use glow in my writing, it is loaded. It is beautiful. It is a part of me.
All of this is.
So thank you, really, for reading.
(And if any of the authors of the aforementioned pieces of art ever reads this: thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I hope these words are able repay my gratitude in some small way.)