The First Video Essay: Or, a Study in Exhaustion and Pride
It is done.
My first video essay, DREAMER: The Transgender Queen of DC Comics, is (mercifully) complete. After hours wasted spent researching transgender representation in comics, forming my thesis, and trying to weave in concepts of transmedia I’ve absorbed through university, I finally wrote the damned thing.
Then came recording.
Hours spent listening back to my own face and voice—my own husky, frustratingly masculine voice—followed by editing sessions that stretched into something that felt less like creative work and more like quiet endurance. Headache after headache. Timeline after timeline. Render after render.
And now, it is done.
For all my misgivings and self-doubt, there’s a strange clarity in writing this—this little update for no one in particular, sans myself and her hedonistic shadow. In that clarity, there is pride.
Pride.
I am proud of my work. I feel, somewhat unexpectedly, accomplished. The feeling almost curdles on contact. The pessimistic part of my mind immediately moves to correct it, to smother it, to insist it is misplaced or temporary or fraudulent. And yet—between those intrusive corrections, in the brief gaps before doubt rushes back in—there is something else...
...something warm.
Not loud. Not triumphant. Just steady. Like a blanket pulled close on a cold night. Like sunlight cutting through the bite of an early morning sea breeze. Like something briefly, stubbornly alive.
I am proud. I am accomplished. And I am warm.
Or perhaps the whiskey has simply taken effect.
DREAMER: The Transgender Queen of DC Comics can be watched now on the Cassidy Dylyn YouTube channel!
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