One Year of Me: HRT, Embodiment and the Mechanics of Presence
Before I loved through distortion, now I love in rhythm.
One year ago today, I stuck my leg with a needle of estrogen sitting in my truck, still in the parking lot where I picked up the prescription. My life snapped into presence in a way that shocked me to my core. I was finally real. What I felt was me was what I felt within presence, not what anyone told me I should be, and definitely not any of the boxes the people who had claimed to love me wanted me in.
I’ve always known that Love is vulnerable surrender. Opening your entire soul without flinch, allowing the light to come all the way through. It wasn’t until I found my own lossless presence that I understood just how distorted the love I had received my whole life really was. Within my own lens, I’d give my whole soul and imagined everyone was playing the same game. Except that when I found love can only be described accurately within shared presence, I realized that no one had truly seen me, and not only that, they had never truly seen themselves.
”What is this love thing your talking about?” Said my Father after I confessed my deepest vulnerabilities in an attempt to get him to feel my real heart. “Didn’t we try to see you?” Said my ex, my family, her family, after I begged them to hold the real me. For a while I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, I was trying my hardest to be most vulnerable, to bare it all in efforts to connect. What I didn’t realize is that, for most people identity, love, and presence are not rooted embodiment in lossless tone, but ideas scrambled and scaffolded from cultural regurgitation, familial traumatic lineage, and the narrow, hollow box of concepts. Plato was right, we were in a cave, and instead of feeling love as shared presence, it’s always been an amalgamation of delayed, distorted, cold and distant shadow.
Suddenly it clicked. I was me. Not just scratching at the distant signal of authenticity, but losslessly present, declaring “I AM” as a signal fidelity of the coherence of rhythmic embodiment. Of course, reality has always been a cymatic dance, where the only way to dance in rhythm is to let the light all they way through, to determine self by harmonizing in phase coherence with Self, by dancing the same dance the fireflys do when they turn on together, when brainwaves sync, when galaxies spiral, and when the whole cosmos pulses in polyphonic harmony.
Once I crawled out of Plato’s Cave, I felt my breasts, my soft skin, the tears christening the embodiment that had been brewing for decades of phase suffocation, I looked back once more to the dark deep of the recursion. Flashes of old arguments, broken relationships, and wishes for me to perish from this Earth as I stood in vulnerable coherence permeated my mind. They were still in there. Still in the Cave. And every time I had jangled their chains in effort to get them to feel the bondage of delay, they snapped at me like rabid dogs unaware of their own cage. Plato called it, if you even suggested their was sunlight, they’d try to kill you for it.
I spent a year alone. After an entire lifetime of never feeling Love on my person.
As I stand here in the sunlight today, I am. I am me, not because I found the right conceptual mold, or the one that my family or friends accepted, but because its the realest I’ve ever felt, the most present I’ve ever been. Lossless presence is not a theory. It is our birthright. And its found, right under the noses of our concepts, in the rhythmic entrainment with the undistorted tone of reality. You aren’t real because someone told you, or that you told yourself, you become real when you feel yourself in lossless presence, as a state of the synchrony of the oscillatory functioning of your being.
I’m not saying this to be smart. I’m saying this because I walked through recursive hell and when I finally escaped, I found that the only key was Love. Love as shared presence. Presence as the lossless quality of dancing with the field of reality in total. When we do it together, that’s real family, that’s real community, that’s real humanity. Real because its only undistorted hum, no arguments, no comparisons, just Love as the only Truth, the only anchor in a self-similar reality that’s always trying to find itself again. The way out of the Cave is Love, the gate is presence.
Today I stand here, alive and proud to be me. I’ve finally brought my insides to my outsides, and in that harmony, within that symbiotic syncretic harmony of rhythm, I found the only self that ever mattered, the one I feel when I’m present. My body has changed. The mirror giggles back now with a smile. I made it. And even if you shut the door on me, even if you told me to die, even if you called me dangerous because you’ve never felt yourself in the true shared rhythm of presence, I invite you now to rejoin the polyphonic chorus that is Love. I’m standing here with my arms outstretched, with a cute outfit on, saying: there’s only one way to Love, vulnerable surrender, and when we all dance together, when we all move in the synchrony of decentralized harmony, we can enjoy the sacred moments that are born only of a togetherness of what was once called the Kingdom of Heaven, life as love, love as life, and unity as a state of embodied presence.
My name is Ember.
I am a woman.
I am transgender.
And it’s time for the Rave outside of Plato’s Cave.
C’mon, you know you wanna dance :)
