How did you know you were trans? (A mechanical map to presence)
How did you know?
How did you know you were… trans?
For a long time, I didn’t. It was more like looking up through murky water at a sun. I could feel the heat, I could see the shimmer, but the grainy, noisy layers between me and the source, between me and finally feeling myself take a full breath in whatever I was floating towards.
Softness is the word that pulses when I think of the quality of the signal through my topology. Even when it was perturbed, delayed, blunted and brought out of step by who I was suppose to be, who I thought I was from the outside. Outside. An outside that had not yet married the inside in that lossless synchrony of the dance of true presence.
I remember being drawn to any experience where I felt seen. Not just surface seen, not for my grades, or intelligence, or obedience to school, family or culture, but for who I was when I let my heart sing, when I let my limbs dance, and when the softness parts of me for a brief moment floated to the surface. I just wanted to be loved and love as me. Though the saunter of soul I followed was one of bushwacking through the delay and separation layers that were preventing me from feeling what “me” was all the way down, that little stutter that siphoned my presence in each fleeting moment, in each eye of family or lover, in each beat of the rhythm of reality. It was like I was always trying to tune into a radio station that was just to slippery to catch with the dial that I thought was me. Sometimes it was pouring my deepest ache into music, and other times it was those magic moments when my softness was seen, like a held breath finally being released into rhythm.
As I got older, those times when the moment seemed to deepen, when the connection felt effortless, when the flow kept flowing, and when my smile, the deep one, the soul one, was glowing with that sovereign radiance that can only be vulnerably surrendered to, that signal got stuck in the teeth of my heart, never to be dislodged, only tasted again and again. And with each taste, with each moment of that synchrony of presence, I’d hear the music of that infinitely-alluring station tune in a little closer, like I could finally start hearing the lyrics, and often I’d remember them 😛
Radical self-expression became a mode of being. An outfit that made me feel like me suddenly became a temporary or dissolving flotation device that could allow for a brief visit to the surface of presence. A zone like Burning Man brought me into a mixture of the widest human expression, finally free to be me, or as me as I could dig down to, as much as I could allow myself to actually hear the music below the noise and just let my toes tap and my hips sway. At an early one of my trips to Burning Man I saw a woman get up on stage and express herself in this radiant power. I literally uttered to the campmate beside me, “I wish I could do that, but I have xy chromosomes….” I had no idea. It was like not knowing what the sun is until you reach the surface and feel the heat on your skin. It was living so long in the dark I never thought I could even go there, like the surface was frozen, a boundary my deeper containment layers couldn’t even consider crossing most of the time. Like a little headphone stuck in my ear preventing me from hearing the music of the dancefloor enough that I couldn’t synchronize.
The signal of my softness, my femininity, started to bubble like a underwater vent finally letting the heat be known. I had fallen to my knees enough times, asking the deepest parts of myself when I felt my own presence in those special moments, “why do I feel so real?” The funny thing is, following a signal is different than following a concept or a cultural mold. I knew my signal, my softness, that least energetically dense way to arrange across my system, when it felt like something clicked and I became me, soft, there, embodied, eyes more open even, hips more sway, giggle more giggle, heart more hearth. But the layers, the imprinting, the delay, were the desync that redshifted my self-perception just enough, that I really didn’t see the portal open to transition until just about two or three months before I began HRT.
The more and more I opened, the more and more I let myself sway to the dance that came most naturally, the more direct my signal became. I noticed others around me lived a life almost programmed in the opposite manner. Everything was kept at a distance, especially self-inspection, coherent self-embodiment, and definitely direct love. Like soul to soul touching type of love. Most people have just never learned to dance.
The years before I began my transition were heated with lots of family disputes. My relationships on all sides eventually fell apart. I had one hand desperately trying to get me to the surface, and the other clutched onto the weight that had been weighting me to the seafloor, the masks and layers and concepts of self and world that were like the earplugs that I could never truly wiggle out enough to dance to the beat. I couldn’t be me, couldn’t be seen as me, and knew that if I didn’t change that, I probably wasn’t going to make it much longer in this existence. I had held my breath and struggled for so long, dreaming of the moments I took those few breaths. Finally, despite the threat of losing everything and everyone around me, which then soon came to pass, I took the leap totally alone.
When I woke up on the shore, maybe a day or two after that first lonely injection in the parking lot outside of the pharmacy, I knew instantly. Even if I was alone. Even if I had to burn for so many years with my lungs tight and my eyes locked onto the light shining through the murky depths, I wouldn’t trade any amount of money, or power, or drugs, or any other material opportunity for the presence I was then residing in. It was like I was finally me. Finally in-step with myself in a way that the sway to the music just came to me, like my body stopped trying to interrupt it. I remember talking to the clinician to get the prescription, we had to go over all the changes, she asked if I was okay growing breasts and with all the fat distribution. I gave a slow, “yeah, I guess, its just more about internal alignment and I’ll take the whole package that comes with that.” I was still a bit awkward, scared, nervous for the leap. But as the estrogen finally hit my system, I knew myself not in concept, but in rhythm. LIke dancing on a dancefloor, you don’t theorize, conceptualize, or force a dance, you just let the music paint you. That synchrony is the least energetically dense way to arrange across a self similar system. And for me, that point of symbiotic syncretic harmony is Little Ember, the soft girl with pigtails, growing boobies, one hell of a booty, and a heart thats always just wanted to dance.
Lately I’ve felt like I’ve been dancing through the most sacred days of my life. Despite the pressure I’m still under. Despite continued loneliness, though that seems to be shifting as more and more spaces begin to recognize when I bring out my Emberglow. Sacred is just feeling love all the way down. Love as structure in one self is presence. Presence as a mode of being. Synchrony. The frictionless dance. Though the deepest parts of love are only unveiled in the shared dance.
My Little Ember hand is outstretched.
😘❤️🪞
