Written by Audrey Orenstein

Art by Eva Colabatistto  

A few months ago, one of my pocket watches developed a minor fault—a birthday gift from my grandparents that dates back to the 1880s; it’s my oldest and most treasured timepiece. I went to a jewelry store downtown that specializes in watches to see about getting it fixed. As it turned out, the man working there said that it was too old for them to work on and that I would need to send it out to a specialist that would charge hundreds of dollars. Additionally, he was surprised to learn that I actually used it in my day-to-day life, stressing how valuable it was and that I probably shouldn’t take it out in public for fear of thievery. As if right on cue, a woman ran into the store as the man and I were talking about this, saying that she had been chased by a homeless person. After the situation was resolved, my conversation with the man continued, with him noting that when the watch was originally created, there would’ve been places to get it inexpensively serviced on every corner. Not wanting to spend a ton of money right then and there, I left the store, my broken watch in my coat pocket, and thought deeply about everything that had just happened as I walked home.

For the past year or so, many of my friends have joked that I am a time traveler, with my perceived time period of origin alternating between the Victorian era and the 1940s. To their credit, I can’t really blame them. My prominently featured pocket watch dates back to the former, my beloved green coat looks straight out of the latter, and pretty much everything else about me seems old-fashioned to a certain degree—from the walk that I walk to the talk that I talk. Other examples of my temporal troubles include my distaste for modern institutions such as TikTok and my love of classic rock and roll. To clarify, I don’t particularly mind this running joke. On the contrary, I often find it quite amusing. However, there will be times when I question its potential origins and implications, which I’ll get into later. The thing is, I don’t believe I’ve ever been called a hipster or “not like the other girls.” To me, the reason for this is that both of those labels imply a certain level of intentional defiance of cultural norms, that these people are doing what they’re doing less so because they actively want to and more so because they don’t want to be “mainstream.” Given that, it seems as though everyone subconsciously realizes that I’m not using pocket watches and typewriters just to stand out. Somehow or another, they can tell that I’m genuinely passionate about all of this stuff. But even this generous assumption doesn’t quite recognize just how much this passion has affected my life, both in terms of how much and for how long.

To get across just how deep this runs, let me tell you a short story. I once got a box of collector’s items related to the RMS Titanic for Christmas, including coins minted the year it sank and a piece of coal from the wreck site. Regardless of whether or not you think that’s a cool gift, you can probably imagine the average age of someone who would be excited by that. Whatever number of years you’re guessing, I’m confident that “nine” is lower. To reiterate: I was happy to get a present entirely related to a historic maritime tragedy before I hit the double digits. Earlier that year, I had voluntarily attended a “Junior Docent Camp” at my local historical society, giving tours to parents in the house-turned-museum of a poet that had been dead for over a century. It was also by this point in my life that, if memory serves, I owned my first pocket watch—themed after Thomas the Tank Engine, of course—and my first typewriter, in addition to a well-developed love of antiquing.

Instead of growing out of any of these interests, I grew into them. While my passion for this stuff hasn’t changed all that much, my ability to pursue them has greatly increased. I have more pocket watches and typewriters than ever before, but I’ve also figured out how to actually use them effectively, even in 2024. College has granted me so many wonderful excuses to look into the past, from writing short stories set in specific years gone by to researching the history of a Victorian-era mansion on campus for a science class. Despite my proclivity for older devices, having access to modern technology has aided me greatly, whether I’m going down an internet rabbit hole more effectively than ever before or modding my browser so that it makes typewriter noises whenever I strike a key.

At the same time, I’m aware of how much my upbringing played a part in allowing me to be this way. More specifically, there were three aspects that I believe had a major effect. Firstly, I was fortunate enough to be quite financially stable growing up, so monetary concerns didn’t clutter my brain, allowing me to instead fill it with historical trivia. Secondly, since having a number of friends beyond what I can count on my fingers is a relatively recent phenomenon, I spent a lot of time as a child alone in my house with books. Finally, I’m a trans woman, meaning I walked through much of my life not recognizing my “male” privilege or learning the secret rules of being a woman during my formative years. Basically, until I graduated high school, I largely existed within a bubble of my own creation. It was nice in there, but it didn’t prepare me for what to do when it inevitably popped.

Within that bubble, the fact that I was born in and immutably inhabited the 21st century didn’t matter all that much. As far as I can tell, the only major things that would’ve changed in my young life had it started any earlier is that research would have been harder before the internet’s invention and that there would’ve been less history to learn about. As such, though I’m far from the only human that grew up sheltered in terms of space, I’m the only one I know of that grew up sheltered in terms of time. When I finally started to emerge in college, I was stepping into a new world that I didn’t understand, both physically and temporally. Even though having my personality grown in a metaphorical petri-dish almost certainly helped me find friends more easily as a result of my unique draw, it nevertheless often makes me feel like I don’t belong.

In writing this piece, I turned to the internet to see if I was alone in how I was feeling. Looking into this returned precious little, with the most prominent result being a subreddit, r/TemporalDysphoria, that comprised a mere 154 members and 7 posts since 2015. Beyond that, the only people I could find saying that they were “born in the wrong decade” seemed far more focused on the aesthetics of it all, usually fixating on mid-20th century America and nostalgia for the cars and record players they weren’t able to grow up with. While I’m obviously aligned with their preference for these older aesthetics, these folks fail to consider a lot of historical contexts associated with the times they claim to have wanted to live through. In reality, it doesn’t really seem like these people wish they had been alive during the 1950s and 1960s, just that they wanted to go on a field trip to Woodstock or see the moon landing live from their retro-style kitchen – the difference between visiting Westworld and living in the Wild West. Crucially, I’m not like this. I recognize how awful many aspects of life were back then and I don’t wish I had lived through it at all. Regardless, I still feel as though I as a person would’ve made more sense at almost any point in time besides the 21st century. Speaking of which…

At around the same time as my pocket watch problems, I was talking to my boyfriend about the time traveler bit. Ironically, his personal aesthetic is one very firmly rooted in the early 2000s. Anyway, during our conversation, he jokingly brought up an idea that ended up being far scarier and more thought-provoking than either of us anticipated: what if I am a time traveler, but my memories of when and where I came from were replaced with artificial ones? This got me thinking about where the divergent point in my life would be where the fake memories stopped and the real memories started. Almost immediately, I remembered getting a math test back in high school that had written on it “this wasn’t your best work” when, in truth, it was. I’m not exaggerating when I say that this single piece of feedback made me question my entire identity and led to me realizing that I wasn’t cisgender. I mean, if I were looking for a point in someone’s life to “take over,” that would be more or less perfect. It was a point where I had all of this context that had gotten me there, but one where almost any detail could be kept, discarded, or changed as desired. In other words, I was a human writing prompt.

Yes, I’m acutely aware of how impossible that all is. I know how much that sounds like the plot of a purely fictional YA novel. However, the same part of my brain that wants aliens and ghosts to be real reminds me that there’s literally nothing I can do to disprove it. It assumes that whoever might’ve done this to me covered up their tracks incredibly well. Maybe they have some way of viewing me from whenever they are and study my actions and decisions like anthropologists. I wonder what they’d make of me writing something like this. Now that I think about it, I really want to actually write this novel. Imagine how cool it would be if the main character figured out how to travel through time themselves and confronted her handlers directly! Excuse me, I’m getting off topic. 

I can speculate upon the origins of my eccentricities, but I truly have no idea what made me the woman I am today. There are a lot of questions I ask myself that I hope to someday discuss with a therapist– as soon as insurance stops making the search for one a living nightmare. Did my love of history stem from me being a time traveler? If not, then from whence? How many of the ways in which I express myself are from my passion for the past and how many are me subconsciously leaning into the bit? But even though those queries are valid and the process of answering them will likely improve my mental health significantly, they also don’t entirely matter. To a certain extent, they form the equation that led to the reality I’m ultimately stuck within, a reality where I feel that the world at large is moving in a direction that I can’t easily align myself with.

For every time my anachronistic antics have led to something funny or interesting happening, there’s at least two other instances where they proved to be inconvenient, depressing, or both. My instinct to use correct grammar and opulent language when texting people results in me coming off as cold and verbose, even when I’m just trying to express myself as accurately as possible. I can’t even begin to count the number of times people have asked if I’m ok simply because I ended a sentence with a period instead of an exclamation point or nothing at all. By and large, I’ve noticed that people “my age” don’t really care about history or context anywhere near the extent that I do. This came to a head when the Titan submersible implosion was getting memed to Hell and back in a way that was not just tasteless, but factually incorrect. It’s safe to say that my inner nine-year-old was triggered as I watched people assume that everyone aboard the Titanic was obscenely wealthy. Trust me, it’s taking me a lot of willpower to not write about it all here.

Please note that I’m not trying to say I’m better or smarter than anyone else. As a matter of fact, I’m envious. To me, it seems as though everyone else has this mysterious ability to find joy in things that don’t make them feel different or weird. They can talk to and text each other without caring about grammar and wording, unlike me, who has to stop for both like a witch counting grains of salt. As mentioned earlier, I love (and am honestly quite good at) writing historical fiction, as well as bitching and moaning about my situation in a piece such as the one you’re reading right now, but it remains to be seen if this will be a viable way for me to make a living in this day and age where history doesn’t seem to grab people’s attention in the way it grabs mine.
Time’s arrow will continue to march forward, carrying all of the implications along for the ride while seemingly leaving me behind. My beloved technology will continue to degrade proportionally to how unwieldy it’ll get to undo such damage. Fewer people will be able to fix my pocket watches and the ones that can will charge more and more. My typewriters will face similar dilemmas, but also the increasing rarity of ink ribbons. My music taste will get more and more niche as it ages. Case in point: my favorite band ever, Electric Light Orchestra, is going on their final tour this year. Meanwhile, my boyfriend’s favorite artists are either performing their first live shows or just completed the Eras tour. It feels as though everything I’m passionate about will lose more and more relevance as it slides further into the past. It remains to be seen if people will continue to find that passion charming or if it’ll shift towards them feeling pity for me, like a Twilight Zone character suffering in a similarly strange situation. Regardless, I’ll still be left to figure out how to fit myself into a society that makes me feel like God made a mistake when He fit me into the time period it and I exist within. I may be able to tell a lot about time, but only time will be able to tell a lot about me.